


That Time Between

by ClandestinePen



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, M/M, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-25
Updated: 2012-12-25
Packaged: 2017-11-22 09:26:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/608304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClandestinePen/pseuds/ClandestinePen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Greg had always thought of Mycroft as more of an institution than a person, evolved beyond and above humanity. But he wasn’t, was he? Somewhere inside, there was a human being, as real and pure as any other."</p>
<p>Written for the Sherlock Secret Santa gift exchange for CurlyBoff.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That Time Between

Something was wrong; Greg knew it before he reached for the doorknob of the grimy and cramped flat he now called home. Maybe he heard the floorboards creak on the other side of the door, or he noticed that his once-askew doormat now lined up perfectly parallel with the wall. He didn’t take the time to suss out why his stomach suddenly knotted and his heart started to pound. No, Greg Lestrade trusted his instincts. He pulled his gun from the gap between his belt and the small of his back, and pushed the door open.   
  
“And just where did you get that?” said a voice on the other side. It was a voice that he’d heard many times before, but not in person for months. He sighed, and flipped on the light.   
  
“Don’t you start lecturing me on carrying a gun, Mycroft,” he said as he stepped inside and saw the other man sitting in his second hand armchair.   
  
“Thought you had to turn it in,” Mycroft said.   
  
“I turned in the one that was issued to me. This one isn’t government registered. And don’t give me any shit about it, either. We both know that John Watson had one, and you never said anything to him.” Greg took his bag of groceries into the kitchen and started to put things away.   
  
“Aren’t you going to ask why I’m here?” Mycroft asked from the chair.   
  
“No. I don’t want anything to do with you.”  
  
“You didn’t answer my texts. Nor my calls.”  
  
“And I didn’t take a ride in your bloody black car, either. I don’t want to hear it.” Greg pushed his new six pack of beer to the back of the fridge, behind the cold ones already there.   
  
“I need your help,” Mycroft said, his tone serious.   
  
“Not interested.”   
  
“I can help you get your job back,” Mycroft said.   
  
“Oh, you can, can you?” Greg stepped out of the kitchen, staring Mycroft down. “If it weren’t for you, I’d still have my job. The least you could fucking do would be to get me my job back, even if I tell you to piss off and get the hell out of my flat.”   
  
Mycroft gave Greg a withering look, but Greg didn’t back down. What’s the point of being afraid, he wondered, if there is nothing left to lose?  
  
“I need you to talk to John. Convince him to allow me to help him. Then I will help you. Then you’ll both be rid of me.” Mycroft suddenly looked very tired; his eyes were dulled and his shoulders slumped.   
  
Greg cursed under his breath, then returned to the kitchen. He came back out with two cold beers, and offered one to Mycroft. When met with a raised eyebrow, Greg said, “I’m not saying I’m going to do what you want, but I’ll hear you out. On my terms.” Mycroft took the offered bottle, and Greg settled onto the couch he also called his bed.   
  
“How did you know to find me here?” Greg asked.   
  
Mycroft tilted his head to one side and raised his eyebrow, as if the question should answer itself. Then he took a cautious sip of the beer and grimaced. Greg showed no such trepidation and took a long swig.   
  
“You are on paid leave, aren’t you?” Mycroft said, his eyes darting around the flat.   
  
“I can’t depend on that. The inquiry isn’t finished. I could still end up unemployed. And this was the best I could do with such a short notice. She kicked me out, Alice did.” He took another long pull on the bottle.  
  
“So I gathered.”   
  
“Because it’s one thing to be married to someone that is out of the house all the time chasing criminals. That’s a hard life to live, I give her that. My mind was always half gone, thinking about some case we were working on or caught up in those horrible things you see when you work on the police force, so even when I was with her I wasn’t really. But she could be proud of me. She’d see my picture in the paper, and she would feel lucky to be my wife. That’s what she used to say. But now my name and my picture are tied up with your brother. I don’t blame her for wanting to run away from that.” Greg took a deep breath and looked back up to meet Mycroft’s eyes. “I don’t blame her because I want to run away from it, too. My whole life, my whole fucking life, is upside down because I saw something in him, and then something in you. Now I’ve got no job, no wife, no friends, and I’m living in a fucking step up from a box.”   
  
“People forget, Lestrade. Some new scandal will come along and before long my brother’s memory will fade away, for better or for worse.”   
  
“People don’t want to forget this. Have you seen the signs people are posting all over London? ‘I believe in Sherlock Holmes.’ He was bigger than you think, and some people won’t let it die because they still want him to be real.” God, Greg did not want to talk about this. He drained the rest of the bottle.   
  
“Do you believe in him?”  
  
His voice took Greg by surprise. He’d known Mycroft Holmes for six years, and he’d never heard anything akin to vulnerability touch his words. Even the night they met, when Greg had arrested a drug-addled Sherlock who -- even high -- managed to solve a damn murder with his hands literally tied behind his back, Mycroft had swept into the station like a man untouchable. He cared for his brother, as anyone could see. But he’d always given an air of confidence, spoken as a man who knew just what to do even when he admitted he had no idea how to fix his brother. Never, in all the years Greg and Mycroft had bounced responsibility for Sherlock back and forth between them and more recently during their clandestine liasons, had he ever heard Mycroft’s voice falter.   
  
Greg pulled out his phone and beckoned to Mycroft with his other hand. “Come here.”   
  
He hesitated for a moment, but then Mycroft rose from the chair and took a seat at the far end of the sofa and looked at Greg expectantly. Greg scrolled through the pictures he stored on his phone, and finally came to the one he wanted. His hand tilted back far enough for Mycroft to see the screen.   
  
“Her name was Leah Erickson. Do you remember who she is?” Mycroft shook his head, and Greg continued, “She was murdered in October 2005. At least, I thought she was murdered. She was found in her bathtub by her mother with both her wrists wide open. My partner at the time was convinced it was a suicide, but something about it didn’t feel right to me. I was insisting on opening an investigation, and no one wanted to listen to me. They thought I wasn’t cut out for a life on the force, too sentimental, and a couple of my colleagues were discussing the case the night I brought in an addict that had just been in a knife fight in some sleazy nightclub. This addict started talking to me the moment I sat down to do his paperwork and didn’t shut up until he’d solved the case, a case that wasn’t even opened. Her boyfriend had done her in. He could tell me the whole story just by looking at a few of the crime scene photos. It was the towel heater that gave it away. I hadn’t thought of why it bothered me, but if she was going to do this to herself why would she have set a towel on to warm up? She was planning on finishing that bath. And if it weren’t for this madman I’d brought in off the street who could read blood spatter like poetry, Leah’s family would have laid her to rest blaming themselves for not seeing warning signs that weren’t there. Leah’s boyfriend would have stayed on the streets and victimized another girl. Sherlock Holmes stumbled into my life and the very first night he changed a whole family for good.” Greg sighed and rubbed at his eyes. “I kept this picture with me, because looking at it always brings me back to that first night I met Sherlock. It reminded me that no matter what a bloody prick he was, that he was also a genius. And without him, Leah’s story would have never been told.”   
  
The flat descended into silence, and after a while Greg could only hear the occasional car swoosh past outside and the rhythm of Mycroft’s breaths. Finally, Mycroft broke the silence.   
  
“John won’t accept my help.”   
  
“Well, he did punch the Chief Superintendent. If you could do that and not spend some time behind bars I think the whole force would form a queue.”   
  
“An exception could be made, but John refuses to speak to me or my assistant.”   
  
“Maybe it’s better,” Greg said. “Maybe it’s better for John to not be alone right now. Or at the mercy of the media.”  
  
After a moment, Greg heard Mycroft make a small sound of understanding, then he started to rise. “If you’re not going to talk to John...”  
  
His hand snatched Mycroft’s luxurious wool sleeve and pulled him back down. “Don’t leave.”   
  
“What else do we have to discuss? I am a busy man,” Mycroft said, settling back down against the cushion.   
  
“Look, I’m angry with you. I wouldn’t be here right now if you and your brother had never walked into my life.”  
  
“If you want to make a complaint, write it down and send it to my secretary,” Mycroft said dryly.   
  
“Will you let me finish?” Greg ran his hand through his hair and sighed in frustration. “My life is shit right now. But these last six years, there have been good things. People that would have ran free are behind bars. Murders that would have gone unsolved are solved. And I wouldn’t have met you. But I had to go to the Chief Superintendent; it was my job.”  
  
“You saved his life,” Mycroft said quietly. “When you agreed to let him consult for you, to give him another outlet, it saved him.”   
  
“Not in the end,” Greg said. He leaned toward the other man, letting his hand rest on Mycroft’s knee. “He was damn lucky to have a brother like you.” Mycroft scoffed at that, but Greg kept talking. “You looked after him, even though he hated it. He never thanked you for pulling his arse out of trouble time and time again. He never appreciated you. But you never gave up on him.” Greg sighed. “I’m sorry.”  
  
“For what?”  
  
“I haven’t asked. Are you alright?”  
  
“Fine.”  
  
“You don’t look fine.”  
  
“Neither do you.”   
  
Greg laughed first, then Mycroft smiled. A genuine, though small, smile. Before they grew closer over the last couple years, Greg had always thought of Mycroft as more of an institution than a person, evolved beyond and above humanity. But he wasn’t, was he? Somewhere inside, there was a human being, as real and pure as any other. Maybe seeing that again, those mental pictures of Mycroft gone soft-voiced or cracking the tiniest smile, is what drove Greg to do what he did next.   
  
It happened all at once, before he could second guess himself. One moment he was having a laugh at his own expense, and the next he was pressing his lips against the side of Mycroft’s mouth. Mycroft jumped briefly, but didn’t move away.   
  
“What are you doing?” Mycroft whispered when Greg pulled back enough to rest his forehead against Mycroft’s.   
  
“You,” he said. “And me.”  
  
“You’re not that intoxicated. You’ve only had one beer.”   
  
“No, I’m not. But I don’t want to talk about your brother anymore, or John. I don’t want to talk about my wife or my job or your job. Damn it, aren’t you lonely sometimes, Mycroft?”   
  
“I hardly notice.”   
  
“Don’t lie. You may be smarter than me, but don’t tell me what I can see. You didn’t just come here to talk. You wanted to see me.” He brought his hand up to Mycroft’s neck, his thumb stroking over his ear.   
  
“Four months ago you told me we were finished and that you were going to work things out with your wife," Mycroft reminded him.  
  
“And you told me you didn’t care.” His tongue darted out and ran across his lips.   
  
Mycroft turned his head toward Greg, just enough to offer the invitation. And Greg accepted.   
  
This was Greg’s favourite part, feeling the always-put-together Mycroft Holmes come apart under his fingers. Tongues slid against one another, and Greg’s fingers worked at loosening Mycroft’s tie. Hands rested on his hips, and fingers tightened against the skin just under his t-shirt. Buttons next, coming off one by one. Greg felt one hand pull him closer while the other moved around front to work the button and zip of his jeans.   
  
Neither man was a poet; they didn’t write sonnets dedicated to the taste of the other man’s lips or the concave flesh just below the hipbone. They never sent each other flowers nor shared takeaway while watching football. But each could see his need reflected in the other man’s eyes; the burn of passion waiting for release; the demons of loneliness that trap men with power and responsibility. A man can recognize what he sees in the mirror every day, even when those things he sees are stretched across another person’s skin.   
  
A fumble of zips and dropped clothing and hoarse whispers and searching hands culminated in panting and sweating and names rushing out of mouths into the stale air of the flat.   
  
“You don’t have to stay in this dreadful place,” Mycroft said after, in that time between when they bask in the afterglow before one starts to dress and the other follows suit.   
  
“Isn’t it a little premature to ask me to move in with you?” Greg teased, running his hand across the soft skin of Mycroft’s bare stomach.   
  
Mycroft cleared his throat. “I meant that I could find you more suitable accommodations.”  
  
“You don’t have to fix everything,” Greg said. And he reached for his pants.

**Author's Note:**

> CurlyBoff, it has been a pleasure stalking you this month. I hope that you enjoy this fic. My very first Mystrade. I was/am both excited and nervous to dip my toes in this water. I haven't even read a Mystrade fic before. Eek! Merry Christmas!
> 
> Everyone else, thank you so much for reading. I hope you enjoyed it as well.


End file.
